Outgrown Notion? Here's What Comes Next

Notion is one of those tools that inspires devotion. People build their entire businesses in it — project management, CRM, knowledge base, SOPs, meeting notes, client portals, hiring pipelines. There are YouTube channels dedicated to Notion templates. People spend weekends reorganising their Notion workspaces for fun.

That devotion is warranted. Notion is genuinely excellent at what it does. Flexible blocks, beautiful formatting, databases that are intuitive to set up — for a small team getting organised, it’s hard to beat.

But there’s a moment that almost every Notion power user hits. The workspace that once felt elegant starts feeling sluggish. The database that tracked 50 clients now tracks 500 and takes forever to filter. The team has grown from 5 people to 25, and nobody can find anything because the page structure has become a maze.

If that sounds familiar, here’s what’s actually going on and what your options look like.

The Performance Wall

Notion databases were built for flexibility, not speed. When your database has a few hundred records and a handful of properties, everything feels snappy. As records grow into the thousands, you’ll notice:

• Pages load slower. A database view with 2,000+ records and several relation, rollup, or formula properties can take 5-10 seconds to render. If your team checks this database 20 times a day, that’s minutes of waiting.
• Filtering and sorting lag. Complex filters on large databases are noticeably slower than they should be. Multi-select filters, date ranges, and formula-based conditions compound the problem.
• Linked databases compound the issue. If you’ve got a projects database linked to a clients database linked to an invoices database, each relation adds load time. Pages with multiple linked database views can take 15+ seconds to become usable.

This isn’t a bug — it’s a fundamental architectural constraint. Notion stores everything as blocks, which is what makes it so flexible. But blocks aren’t optimised for database-scale queries the way a real database engine is.

No Real Automation

Notion has basic automations — when a property changes, you can update another property, send a notification, or add a page to a database. But compared to what growing businesses need, the automation capabilities are thin:

• No external triggers — you can’t have an automation fire when an email arrives, a payment is received, or a form is submitted on your website (without connecting Zapier or Make as middleware)
• No conditional logic — you can’t branch: “if the deal value is over $10,000, notify the sales director; otherwise, auto-assign to the next available rep”
• No time-based triggers — “send a reminder 3 days before a task is due” or “escalate if status hasn’t changed in 48 hours” aren’t possible natively
• No external actions — you can’t send an email, create an invoice in Xero, or update a record in your CRM from a Notion automation

The result is that Notion becomes the place where information lives, but not the place where things happen. Your team still has to manually check databases, remember to follow up, and copy data between Notion and other tools. The operational workflow exists in people’s heads, not in the system.

Permissions That Don’t Match Your Org Chart

Notion’s permission model has improved over the years, but it still doesn’t handle the reality of how mid-size businesses work:

• No field-level permissions — you can’t hide the “cost price” or “margin” column from sales reps while showing it to managers
• No record-level access — you can’t restrict a salesperson to only see their own deals in a shared database
• Teamspaces help, but fragment data — creating separate teamspaces for different departments means losing the cross-references that made Notion useful in the first place
• Guest access is clunky — sharing specific pages with clients or contractors exposes your workspace structure and is hard to manage at scale

For a 5-person team where everyone sees everything, this is fine. For a 25-person business with salespeople, operations staff, contractors, and clients who all need different views of the same data, the permission model forces uncomfortable compromises.

The Integration Gap

Notion connects to other tools via its API, and there are third-party integrations through Zapier and Make. But the integrations are surface-level:

• Accounting software — there’s no native connection to Xero, MYOB, or QuickBooks. You can’t turn an accepted proposal in Notion into an invoice automatically.
• CRM functionality — Notion can hold CRM data, but it can’t send emails, log calls, track email opens, or automate follow-up sequences the way a real CRM does.
• Document generation — you can’t auto-generate a branded PDF proposal, contract, or report from Notion data without significant workarounds.
• Field team access — Notion’s mobile app is functional but slow, and there’s no offline access. For teams with staff in the field — construction sites, client visits, warehouse floors — this is a non-starter.

The offline issue deserves special attention. If your business has anyone who works in areas with poor connectivity — rural sites, basements, large commercial buildings — Notion simply doesn’t work. They can’t view data, update records, or access SOPs. They’re cut off from the system entirely.

What to Migrate To (And How to Think About It)

The answer depends on which limitations are actually hurting you:

If performance is the main issue, consider moving your larger databases to Airtable or SmartSuite while keeping Notion for documentation and knowledge management. Notion is excellent as a wiki and SOP library — it just shouldn’t be your operational database.

If you need real automation, look at platforms that have it built in — Monday.com, ClickUp, or SmartSuite all offer more capable automation than Notion. But be realistic: each of these has their own limitations. If your automation needs are complex, you’ll hit similar walls in 12-18 months.

If permissions are the problem, you need a system designed with role-based access from the ground up. This is hard to bolt onto any general-purpose tool. Purpose-built software handles it naturally because permissions are designed around your specific roles and data.

If integrations are the bottleneck, the question is whether you need a handful of specific connections (which middleware like Zapier can handle) or a deeply integrated system where data flows automatically between tools. For the former, Zapier or Make is fine. For the latter, you’re looking at custom integrations or an all-in-one platform.

The Migration Itself

Moving out of Notion is less scary than it sounds, but it does require planning:

1. Audit what you actually use. Most Notion workspaces are 40% active content, 30% outdated pages nobody’s touched in six months, and 30% aspirational structure that was never filled in. Don’t migrate the dead weight.

2. Separate knowledge from operations. Your SOPs, meeting notes, and company wiki might be fine staying in Notion. It’s the operational databases — CRM, project tracking, inventory, job management — that typically need to move.

3. Map your data relationships. Before you move anything, draw out how your databases connect. Which databases link to which? What rollups and formulas exist? This map is the blueprint for whatever you build next.

4. Migrate in phases. Don’t try to replace everything at once. Move the most painful system first, get it stable, then tackle the next one. Running Notion alongside a new system for a transition period is normal and fine.

The businesses that handle this best are the ones who recognise that Notion served them well and gave them clarity about what they need. Every database you built, every relation you set up, every view you configured — that’s a specification for what your next system needs to do. You didn’t waste time in Notion. You prototyped your business operations, and now you’re ready to build the real thing.